Tag Archives: trading

I’ve written before about how much I enjoy manga trading. It’s a great way to try out a series or find volumes of older titles. I’ve been fairly active on Mangatude and usually check for new trades every week or so. While doing my usual check this week, there was a trade offer titled “Manga series on cd many rare ones.” Yeah, scanlations. This didn’t really feel right. When I go looking to trade, I’m looking for same to same. It might seem like a great deal, to get a bunch of different manga for one print volume, but it seems to violate the spirit of the site.

Anyone can go out and find scanlations, download them, and burn them to a CD. It’s not the same as going out, finding and buying a manga volume. Getting a CD full of titles doesn’t seem to have same value. It becomes a bunch of files that can get tossed to the wayside. Because no work went into getting them, there’s no real value in reading them. With trading, there’s the offer and counter trade, sometimes working out, sometimes taking more work, so even a trade that ends just costing the amount in postage has more worth. And physical copies stare back at you, demanding you read them. They aren’t hidden away on a disc of in a file folder to be forgotten. I really hope this doesn’t become a trading trend.

A week or so ago, I wrote about trading manga and the website Mangatude. While, as some have mentioned, this doesn’t actually reduce the number of manga you have. It just switched them. But, if they were books you wanted and would have spent money on, well, it’s a good deal. But only if both players are playing by the same rules.

For trading to work, there has to be some trust. When a deal is struck, you have to trust that the other person will send the book, just as they trust that you will do the same. Of course, when you make that trade, you don’t know if the person will or not. Mangatude has a rating system, so before you accept a trade, you can see what experience others have had, and this can help measure whether you’re will to make the deal. But, there is a way to beat this system, though it takes time. It’s appeared on eBay, and now it seems on Mangatude.